Thoughts on new races:
The Terracotta army sounds cool.
I do like the idea of adding a race that uses warpstone.
I was thinking it might be good to make a race of invaders with a link to books and archeology, since both of those aspects are a bit bland as they stand. The mooted egyptian themed race would fit well with that.
What I am envisioning is:
-A race of Anubi that comes equipped in fossil armour and weapons.
-With a spellcaster caste that is able to raise "mummies".
-Possibly with chariots, thought that might fit better with the Terracotta Army - both Ancient Egypt and Ancient China used chariots, but giving both armies chariots might reduce the flavour of both enemies.
-Drop books (the non-magical ones that are used in skill training) and fossil items when killed.
-I really don't like the idea of a race of jackal-men in ancient Egyptian kit just coming over the hill one day and attacking the fortress, much more interesting would be if they were the "guardians of the hidden knowledge" who had a chance of appearing when your fortress recovered powerful fossil artifacts.
Say the Anubi were created in a similar way to the reaction that creates golems and turrets now, only instead of the reaction creating a creature friendly to the fortress, it creates an enemy or a squad of enemies. More valuable fossils would have higher likelihoods of resulting in Anubi appearing, and the most valuable fossils would tend to result in whole squads of Anubi or single powerful Anubi spell casters coming to protect the knowledge that your foolish Dwarfs were trying to steal from the depths.
It would also continue the work Masterwork has been doing developing threats that strike from inside the fortress.
Clearly, the more dangerous the Anubi, the more powerful fossils should be, in order to tempt players to risk their wrath, just as adamantine tempts us to risk demonic invasion. Fossil magical tomes for example. I'm not sure that making fossil weapons and armour be another "better than steel" material is a great idea, since there are already alot of those, maybe if fossil items were the same as bronze, but had special powers, similar to the way Volcanic has special anti-frost giant properties? I am not sure what sort of special powers are possible given the limitations of raw editing though.
The idea of the magical tomes being something I had to battle Egyptian deities to get makes me thirst to build a fortress of god-killing sorcerer dwarfs, and I'm one of these folks who usually plays Masterwork as low-magic as I can.
fasquardon